68 pages • 2 hours read
Doris LessingA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Above all, The Golden Notebook is a künstlerroman, a novel of the making of an artist. Anna confronts her disappointment with her first novel, Frontiers of War, excoriating its excessive sentimentality and romanticization of war. She then enters a period of prolonged writer’s block; she is insistent that she will no longer write. Lessing herself points to this theme in her introduction to the novel: “a main character [of The Golden Notebook] should be some sort of an artist, but with a ‘block’” (xi). This is linked not only to her own disavowal of her earlier creation but also to the forces of modernity: In the face of the atrocities of the 20th century, art lacks the power to speak or to heal. In this way, Lessing is linked to other writers of the early 20th century, in particular James Joyce. Anna herself refers to Joyce and his work several times throughout her notebooks. As he famously wrote in Ulysses, “history […] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (Joyce, James. Ulysses. Dover Publications, 2012, p. 34). Anna’s version relates to her nightmare of destruction: “I am back inside a nightmare which it seems I’ve been locked in for years” (345).
By Doris Lessing
A Woman on a Roof
Doris Lessing
Briefing for a Descent Into Hell
Doris Lessing
Martha Quest
Doris Lessing
No Witchcraft for Sale
Doris Lessing
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
Doris Lessing
The Fifth Child
Doris Lessing
The Grass is Singing
Doris Lessing
Through the Tunnel
Doris Lessing
To Room Nineteen
Doris Lessing
Books & Literature
View Collection
British Literature
View Collection
Colonialism Unit
View Collection
Feminist Reads
View Collection
Mental Illness
View Collection
National Suicide Prevention Month
View Collection
Nobel Laureates in Literature
View Collection
Popular Study Guides
View Collection
Pride Month Reads
View Collection
Psychological Fiction
View Collection
School Book List Titles
View Collection
The Best of "Best Book" Lists
View Collection
Women's Studies
View Collection